the choice of the right color seems to be a challenge, that’s at least what I hear from a lot of my students. of course you can trust your intuition or get inspired by the right music, but I think it might be safer to collect enough information, in this case – visual reference. maybe you have enough photos in your archives to choose from, but in any case you can find everything and fast on the internet. as an example I picked the theme WINTER.

when I did the production design for BALTO I had to do a lot of research about alaska, snow covered mountains and deep forests, whatever I could find about the cold northern winter. without checking photographic- or art-reference you probably would go for a lot of white with some greyish-blue colors. in case of BALTO we wanted to avoid that cold color-range as often as possible. the white with blue color combination feels cold and you don’t want your audience to start freezing.
when you look at the collected photos you will find blue as the dominant color, but as well a lot of other balancing colors you could use to go into a different warmer range.

in the second big compilation you can study a wide range of artwork from around the world and from over the last two hundred years covering the same theme. here as well the color choices of the different artists were not just blues and greys. you can check that very well in my color-picks.

that is how I usually start, in case I need to come up with a color script. you select all the colors from whatever reference you use and then condense the color-picks to the range that fits your storyline the best, and – you choose colors harmonizing with each other. according to the story you are working on, a lot more goes into the choice of the right color, especially in your color script, where you need to translate the development of the drama and illustrate the mood. in some cases your story in the climax part of the film might need even in a winter snowy environment completely different colors, colors that symbolise the idea and not the reality.

storytelling and the visual arts are very close connected. look at the stories on the walls of the caves of lascaux. or most religious art throughout the middle ages, like the illuminated manuscripts or the stained glass windows of the christian cathedrals. art helps us to perceive aspects of reality we could not see otherwise. a chinese proverb says – one picture is worth ten thousand words, or – what ivan s.turgenev wrote 1862 in his novel ‘fathers and sons’ – ‘the drawing shows me at one glance what might be spread over ten pages in a book.’
in the compilation of artwork below I have collected some stories from all over the world. note besides the content their composition, the way the artists lead your eyes through their story. and study how the color is used to support the atmosphere, to help the viewer develop an emotional feeling.

based on a medieval german fairy tale THE PIED PIPER OF HAMELIN czechoslovak film director JIRI BARTA produced in 1986 the 53 min long puppet-animated movie THE PIED PIPER ( ‘Krysař’ in czech, what means THE RAT CATCHER ). the whole jiří trnka studio KRATKY FILM was involved in what was one of the most ambitious projects in the history of Czech animation. research and preproduction time took six months, the filming with puppets up to 60 cm tall one year. barta’s ‘horror’-film creates a striking contrast to the disney version of the pied piper legend as a children’s comedy, his fascinating metaphor for a society focused on material demands comes to life in a very artistic style, heavily influenced by german expressionistic painters like EMIL NOLDE, MAX BECKMANN, ERICH HECKEL, CARL HOFER, ERNST LUDWIG KIRCHNER, MAX PECHSTEIN, KARL SCHMIDT-ROTTLUFF and KAETHE KOLLWITZ – but as well by medieval wooden sculpture artists like JOERG SYRLIN, HANS MULTSCHER and TILMAN RIEMENSCHNEIDER. interesting is the similarity in the tilted angles and twisted shapes in the environment of the 1920 silent horror film THE CABINET OF DR.CALIGARI directed by ROBERT WIENE. below some of the stylized sets of the puppet-animated film and the reference art that was probably used.

it is a challenge to develop a special style for an illustration, an animated movie or just a character. the goal is to create something that nobody has done before. for that reason and of course for inspiration I recommend to gather all reference that is available. usually the amount of information we have is not sufficient, information not just about the designwork in illustration and film of the past few years, but information about what has been created in ‘the arts’ over the past 12.000 years. starting with the cave paintings of lascaux, early highly stylized egyptian art as well as greek- and roman sculptures and mosaics, and the whole medieval art from byzanthine to gothic. further in more recent centuries baroque, rokoko, romanticism, impressionism, art nouveau, expressionism and of course all the modern art of the past 70 years. not to forget russian-, oriental-, persian- and indian-, southern american-, african-, eskimo- and aborigine art.

the knowledge about all these different ‘styles’ is helpful. in the past it was pretty difficult if not impossible to find all the right publications or visit enough museums to study the vast amount of art that has been created all over the world. today it is much easier to research through the internet, with a bit detective work everybody interested enough can do it.

most of the above compiled artwork in figurative art was created over the past 500 years. the series will be continued, I want to concentrate on some more unusual and lesser known art. hopefully that will encourage you to start your own archives.

ABOUT ME

my name is hans bacher, – I work as production designer in the animation film industry. for the last 40 years I lived and worked in duesseldorf, london, paris, los angeles, manila and tokyo. now I am professor for film-design at the nanyang techn. university in singapore.